Impact Story: From Sustainable Tourism Developer to Animal Welfare Charity Founder

Ameer Virani (2024 Impact Accelerator Program alum) shares his journey from sustainable tourism developer to founding an animal welfare charity.

Ameer Virani spent ten years working on the development of sustainable tourism in Southeast Asia and is now a farmed fish welfare charity founder. His initial decision to work in sustainable tourism was driven by an idealistic motivation to have impact, but also by a selfish desire to live and work in new geographies, something he found very exciting. These were, and continue to be, his two primary career objectives.

After about eight years working on a variety of projects for non-profits and for-profits in Southeast Asia, he started to become frustrated with his limited ability to create meaningful impact through sustainable tourism work, something he later learned to refer to as a “lack of tractability”. This frustration led him to start exploring the concept of effective altruism, which helped him realise why he was frustrated by his current work, namely the absence of impact measurement in the tourism sector. Not knowing if his work was having any meaningful impact left him very demotivated, so he decided to shift the focus of his career away from tourism’s three pillars of sustainability – people, planet, profit – to the three pillars of effective altruism – importance, neglectedness, tractability – which seemed to be a more practical way of approaching doing good through his work.

What did he do next? He didn’t wait for good intentions alone to magically save his career. He took action by taking the 🔶 10% Pledge, followed the Intro to EA virtual program, attended EAG London, started speaking to a bunch of people doing impactful work, read plenty of books and materials on 80,000 Hours’ website, and joined HIP’s Impact Accelerator Program. His conclusion after this 1-2 year process, during which he continued to work in sustainable tourism, was that he could meet his two primary career objectives – have an impact and work in interesting places – by working on farmed animal welfare in the Global South.

By narrowing down his focus, he was able to better understand how he could personally make a difference by going through Animal Advocacy Careers’ online course, Welfare Matters’ Southeast Asia Farmed Animal Welfare Fellowship, and most recently, Ambitious Impact’s Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program, which led to him to found Scale Welfare, a charity focusing on farmed fish welfare in Southeast Asia.

The funneling process is complete, for now!